Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

by Suki Kim

Not being a real journalist—at least I did not consider myself one—I dreaded the prospect of covering the DPRK alongside so many veterans, until I realized how little they knew of North Korea, and how little they managed to find out. A cable news anchor hosted a special in which she watched the concert on TV with an “average” North Korean family that had been selected by the government.

Heh. Y, journalism experience doesn’t compensate much for unavoidable ignorance.

President Kim turned out to be James Kim, an evangelical Christian Korean-American, and a quick Internet search brought up interviews with him about a similar college he had set up in the early 1990s in Yanji, China, called Yanbian University of Science and Technology (YUST). In one of the interviews, Kim said that he had raised $10 million from evangelical churches worldwide to construct the school in Pyongyang.

Why did Pyongyang green light this? Just for the money? And despite the “risks” of missionary brainwashing? Guess threats should be enough to keep them at bay...or they figure they could just imprison anyone who catches Christianity?

Running the school would be quite expensive, with heating costs alone estimated to be at least $1,500 per day.

Side glance. That is costly. Someone outside he school is definitely benefiting. And as this shows, there are many more ways to transfer money besides “building materials” to its host country. Definitely the money then.

Finally, in December 2009, a call came from President Kim’s Seoul office, telling me to get ready to go to Pyongyang in a few months. No one ever questioned me about my faith, and I did not volunteer any information. I received almost no instructions.

Interesting that they hadn’t vetted the teachers for missionary-readiness? Or were they cover for a smaller number of true operatives? Might be a good strategy.

My visa, once approved for “entry,” had to be stamped by as many as thirty-five government agencies within North Korea to be approved for “release.” President Kim had asked that the process be expedited or waived altogether for the PUST teachers, and they were waiting for a new law to pass for this to happen. “A new law? That could take months, even years!” I said via Skype, but Joan assured me that in North Korea such a thing could happen in a matter of days and told me to start packing.

At once both insanely officious and “efficient”? ;)

You would think that, being a writer, I would have put books at the top of my list, but in fact, books were the last things on my mind. The things I packed were more basic: an extra pair of glasses, disposable contact lenses, sanitary napkins, ibuprofen, vitamins and antibiotics of all kinds, plus as many protein bars as I could jam in my suitcases.

She knew what she was doing.

wherever else you are in Pyongyang, your senses are never left in peace. Inevitably music blasts from a speaker nearby. Sometimes it is a love song, sometimes a marching tune, but the topic is always the same. Virtually every building is adorned with a slogan, every TV screen with the same image, the way advertising billboards fill the horizon in Western societies, but in North Korea there is only one product: the Great Leader.

I imagined the longing of not just one person but of an entire nation. The idea of it put the concept of a long-distance relationship to shame. The eternal wait must have become a test of loyalty. Who could stay faithful to their beloved the longest? Love did not conquer all. Lovers were punished for loving—the forced separation bled their hearts. I imagined these pent-up feelings percolating in the air and hushed in the soil of the Korean peninsula, this diseased nation split in two.

Awakening my students to what was not in the regime’s program could mean death for them and those they loved. If they were to wake up and realize that the outside world was in fact not crumbling, that it was their country that was in danger of collapse, and that everything they had been taught about the Great Leader was bogus, would that make them happier? How would they live from that point on? Awakening was a luxury available only to those in the free world.

it was consistent with outside reports that Kim Jong-un, the “Precious Leader,” was being positioned to take over for the sixty-nine-year-old Kim Jong-il, who had suffered a stroke in 2008, and that every university student had been taken out of school and sent to do construction work until April 2012, when the entire nation would celebrate Kim Il-sung’s one hundredth birthday. I was not sure what to think. Western news reports about the DPRK were often unreliable, and the closing of all universities other than PUST seemed an extreme measure, even for North Korea.

Most extreme is that PUST students were excluded? What is the message there? Or was naive attempt to hide this conscription from foreigners? How would they not notice? Wouldn’t regime want all young men to participate?

Perhaps the Great Leader believed not in Kim, but in the cash the Christians raised to fund this free, relatively posh school for the North Korean elite.

Moreover, I knew of no science teachers at the school, despite the fact that it was called the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. I wanted to know why my students had not been sent to do construction like the others, but there was no one I could ask.

Every evening, I thought back to the conversations that had taken place earlier that day during each meal, trying to determine whether I had said something I should not have. It takes tremendous energy to censor yourself all the time, to have to, in a sense, continually lie.

Instead all I saw was their heartbreaking youth and energy, and I wished then that they could have the whole world, all of it, that which had been denied to them for twenty years of their lives, because none of them had any idea that as their bodies bounced, their minds stood so very still within that field in that campus locked away from time.

But imagine how well off they are compared to many other DPRK residents!

Another thing that baffled the students was the pronoun “my.” When referring to Pyongyang, they never said “my” city, but rather “our” city. The DPRK was never “my” country but “our” country. In fact, the words Pyongyang and DPRK were always modified with “our,” as in “our Pyongyang” or “our DPRK.” Even when we gave them a special lesson on “my” versus “our,” and made clear that they could drop “our” altogether with proper nouns, they seemed confused.

And did the closing of the universities have anything to do with the fact that Kim Jong-il’s health was failing and that a change of regime might be imminent? Our students were the crème de la crème of this society. Of course they would not be sent to construction fields like the rest, but instead sent here, to a boarding school within their own city, where they could practice their English and wait for the political storm to pass. Was it our job, then, to provide the sons of the North Korean elite with a temporary sanctuary?

That’s why they were sent to PUST? To shelter them away from manual labor?

It was clear to me that there was one set of people in Pyongyang—among them my students, the party leaders, the minders—who were well fed and had healthy complexions and were of regular height, and then there were all the other people, the ones I glimpsed through the windows of the bus. On weekend shopping trips, I had seen them on the streets, cutting trees or sweeping the sidewalk or riding trams. They were often bony, their faces almost dark green from overexposure to the sun or malnutrition or something worse.

I could not help but think that they—my beloved students—were insane. Either they were so terrified that they felt compelled to lie and boast of the greatness of their Leader, or they sincerely believed everything they were telling me. I could not decide which was worse.

We did not pass a single car during the ninety minutes it took us to get to our destination. We did, however, pass two checkpoints, where guards with metal batons waved us down.

Nearly anywhere else in the world, a mountain like this would be filled with families on a Saturday afternoon. Yet we saw only one group of schoolchildren the whole time we were there. They crowded around us and posed with us for pictures, but soon their teachers came down, stopped our picture taking, and took them away.

Wow, the children were allowed to run off on their own and approach foreigners?

North Korea had an unofficial caste system called songbun in which citizens were divided into three main classes and some fifty subclasses, based on a person’s political, social, and economic background, and although they pretended that such hierarchies did not exist, this affected their social mobility. The government had succeeded in wiping out the ancient clan system and replacing it with their own; many North Koreans no longer had the support of an extended family and had no one to rely on but their Great Leader.

we again passed at least three groups of children sitting on the highway. They looked like they were between the ages of five and ten. It was dinnertime and the sight of unescorted children sitting on the pavement in the middle of a highway was unusual, but of course we could not ask the meaning of this.

On a couple of occasions, I noticed formally dressed women walking alongside the highway, which seemed mysterious as there was nothing behind us and nothing they could be walking toward, and we had passed no buses or cars, and I knew there was no bus stop nearby, and it was rapidly getting dark.

Observations from the tour bus but she could get no explanations (simply to ask would invite trouble). She also saw schoolchildren playing in the highway and zero artificial light even at dusk.

Small, dark, emaciated people with dead eyes. A landscape devoid of any organic signs of life. I remembered how Katie had whispered the word slaves. And when I saw my students marching, I thought of the word soldiers. There they were, every direction we turned: soldiers and slaves.

I realized that the decision to close the universities must have been made this past spring; otherwise, the sophomores would be of the same social class as the freshmen. Something had happened earlier in the year that made the regime close all the universities, and that made those who wielded power rush to pull their sons out of the schools they attended and enroll them at PUST. Something big was in the works.

Dismantling of the universities?

I was not sure if, having been told such lies as children, they could not differentiate between truth and lies, or whether it was a survival method they had mastered.

When a student from Class 1 said, openly and unashamedly, that the unfortunate thing about losing the trivia game was that they had been caught cheating and should have cheated better, I wondered if it was possible that they had never been taught that lying was a bad thing. Perhaps they felt free to continue doing it as long as they could get away with it. Was it possible that they just did not know right from wrong?

The funding for PUST came from individual donors around the world, as well as from the South Korean Ministry of Unification, with no contribution that I knew of from North Korea. Apparently, the rest of the world was feeding and educating the children of their leaders. On a micro level, there were the frequent requests for small sums of money that we had gotten used to. The counterparts wanted to be fed, and we were expected to accommodate them.

we noticed many shiny cars, including Land Rovers and Mercedes Benz 300s, all of them black like every other car I had seen in Pyongyang. I wondered if some of the attendees were my students’ parents. Every time I saw people in power, I asked myself the same question. I looked upon those people as the cause of North Korea’s ongoing demise, and yet I loved their children.

Each time I visited the DPRK, I was shocked anew by their bastardization of the Korean language. Curses had taken root not only in their conversation and speeches but in their written language. They were everywhere—in poems, newspapers, in official Workers’ Party speeches, even in the lyrics of songs performed on this most hallowed day. It was like finding the words fuck and shit in a presidential speech or on the front page of the New York Times.

Once, a couple of the saleswomen asked me where I was from, and when I told them that I had grown up in the South, they said that they had assumed as much from my Seoul accent, which they found beautiful. That was the first time I realized that some ordinary North Koreans liked South Koreans, or maybe even found us glamorous.

At the market

One said he always helped his mother by carrying buckets of water up the stairs: “It takes a lot of water to wash one hundred fifty kilos of cabbage.” That suggested there was no fresh water at his house, despite the fact that his family was part of the elite.

Re: kimjang, annual making of kimchi, revealing living standards of the elite

What I saw as pop culture the missionaries saw as heresy, and so might the counterparts, so whatever information reached the students was doubly censored. But it seemed strange that their Lord did not like Harry Potter but had allowed the story to spread around the world faster than just about any in modern history.

The missionaries acting similar to the regime, trying to hide things they don’t want DPRK citizens (or prospective evangelical converts) exposed to.